Then he saw her smiling face in a bluish glow that bloomed in the tunnel from her hands. She'd found herself a cell phone.

  Taahid rose and reached a hand out to help her rise as more shouting, panting men brushed past them on the way to the fighting. She was almost to her feet when the floor shifted violently beneath them. A hot wind threw them into each other and against a wall of the tunnel in a painful tangle.

  Taahid was dizzy and fighting to breathe in air choked with fine debris. Beneath him, Ilse lay unconscious and white with dust in the glow of the cell phone still held open in her hand. There was a black stain spread over her face from a ruined nose. That adorable pug nose now just torn flesh and blood. He felt his gorge rising and swallowed bile.

  Hands grabbed him about the arms and pulled him upright. He passed out then.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  THE PIT

  The team sought cover from the blast around a turn in the tunnel where it led to a ladder well topped by an iron door. They clapped hands to ears and held their mouths wide open. The twin packs of Semtex went off simultaneously and filled the space with a cloud of choking dust. The night vision lenses allowed them to see through the fog to a heavily digitized vision of the tunnel opening collapsed in on itself in a pile of broken blocks. Twisted rebar and tons of fill dirt had fallen from above.

  "Well, we've just cut our options in half," Heath said.

  "We were going up anyway," Manny said. "Those guys in the vehicles queered any evac going back the way we came."

  "Listen," Chili said.

  They all grew quiet.

  The steady sound of metal on cement. The sound of shovels. The men in the tunnel, one side of the fight or the other, were digging their way toward them. Either way they'd be after blood. Four Americans with their backs literally to the wall wouldn't last long.

  "Got to be the loyalists," Chili said. "Got to be."

  "The rebels wouldn't have digging tools," Manny said.

  "We need to get out of this tunnel and topside before they either get through or think about radioing ahead to their buddies upstairs," Heath said.

  "There's a reinforced, steel door at the top of that ladder well," Chili said. "We try and blow it and we could bring the whole well down on us, including the ladder. Then we're fucked royally."

  "We knock," Flame said. He was standing shaky and bracing himself on a wall with one hand.

  "What?" Heath said. "You get hit in the head too?"

  "They're probably expecting that convoy we delayed," Flame said slow and deliberate as he sipped air slowly to deal with the knifing pain in his back. "We just knock. They'll think we're them."

  "Could work," Manny said and shrugged.

  "Better than waiting for those assholes to break through," Flame said, grinning hard against the agony shooting up and down his spine.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Ikenna Eze was losing at cards.

  Chima suggested a game of Whot to relieve the boredom of the waiting and waiting in the dark cellar of the Ahhamid bunker. Above them the irregular pounding from artillery shells was only interrupted a few times a day by the more thunderous cacophony of air strikes. It all seemed so far away, muffled by four feet of reinforced concrete under sixty feet of earth. More like a noisy upstairs neighbor than a war happening five levels above their heads.

  This was not what Ikenna traveled all the way from Nigeria for; to sit in a hole in the ground, waiting for the Arabs to make up their minds. He came for the fighting, the cash and the rape. So far he had been disappointed; though the food was good.

  "Star eight?" Ikenna said with disgust and threw down his cards. "That is the third star eight Ozioma has thrown this round."

  "You accuse me of cheating you?" Ozioma asked; his yellow eyes flat like a snake's.

  It was not an accusation made lightly in a room filled with anxious men armed to the teeth and seated around a table piled with Euros and English pound notes. Mercenaries refused to be paid in Libyan dinars which were growing more worthless by the day.

  "I am tired only," Ikenna said and feigned a yawn before standing up from the table. "I am out, yes."

  The play went on without him and he left the room clouded thick with cigar smoke and made his way back to the rooms assigned to the mercs up from the sub-Sahara. He thought of what he would do with his pay when he got back to Lagos. These dreams of avarice were interrupted by a regular metallic pounding noise. It was coming from the rear of this bunker level, from the room with the stores of bottled water and rice.

  Ikenna walked between aisles of palettes stacked ten feet high with cases of imported bottled water, beer, canned vegetables and fifty-pound bags of white and brown rice. At the back of the room was a steel door set in the concrete floor. It had throw bolts securing it closed on the sides, top and bottom. A booming sound came from beneath. Someone was down there striking on the door.

  "Who is there?" Ikenna asked in Hausa, his native tongue back in Nigeria.

  After a pause a voice came faint through the steel.

  Ikenna laid down on the floor and put his ear against the door.

  "Who is there?" he said again more loudly. "What do you want here?"

  "To come in, you stupid uasherati, mwana wa," the voice answered in Hausa.

  "A whore's son, am I?" Ikenna still felt shame at backing down to Ozioma. He was not going to take this abuse from some idiot speaking to him from a hole in the floor.

  One by one he pulled the bolts free and lifted the heavy door open. A grinning white man was standing on a ladder beneath the door and holding a pistol with a very long barrel trained on Ikenna's head.

  Ikenna had time only to recall the man had also called him ‘stupid.'

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Chili levered himself up through the opening and rolled the dead African aside before the spreading pool of blood from his exploded skull and the stream of piss from his pants reached the opening. The guys would not appreciate a shower of bodily fluids raining down on them.

  Heath was up next and helped Flame through the hole. Flame winced. He wasn't moving right. The shots he took to the armor did more than knock his lungs empty.

  Last up was Manny.

  "Looks like Gaddafi's Sam's Club," he said looking at the rows of goods lining the walls.

  "Do we trick the door out for the hadjis following us?" Heath asked.

  "Just throw the bolts and pile some of this shit on top of the door," Flame said from where he leaned on some rice sacks to take the weight off his spine.

  Chili and Heath stacked a thousand pounds of rice and cases of canned goods on top of the door. Even if the men digging after them tried to burn through the door with a torch, the weight of the rice would effectively block the opening. Manny looked after Flame.

  "You going to hack it, bro?" he said.

  "Sons of bitches must have hit me in the spine," Flame said through clenched teeth. The adrenalin had spent itself and now the pain was settling in. "But I can see it through."

  "With a little help?" Manny asked.

  "Yeah," Flame said after a moment. "Fix me up, bro."

  Manny rummaged through his shoulder bag and came up with a slim plastic vial. MS Contin, a strong morphine-derived painkiller.

  "Three," Flame said.

  Manny didn't question him and tapped three small blue and red tabs into Flame's palm. Flame slapped them into his mouth and swilled down a half-bottle of water.

  "Now all I got to do it stay awake," Flame said.

  "I'll see you don't get bored," Manny grinned.

  Chili and Heath finished piling up rice sacks and soup cans atop the floor hatch.

  "Backdoor's closed," Heath said. "We have a plan from here or can I make a suggestion?"

  "Fire away, big man," Manny said. "I am wide open for fresh options."

  "This op is fucked," Heath said. "We spun the wheel and it landed on shit. I say we make for the surface and fade into the woodwork. If we see our chubby little Chinaman on our way upstairs, we grab him. Otherwise we are sayonara, motherfuckers."

  "Yeah, we're options zulu," Chili said. "Let's go with that."

  "We get topside I can link with Freeman," Manny said. "He can guide us out of the fighting. Find us one of those NATO advisory units so we can get out country on the quiet."

  "Sounds righteous," Flame said with a grin, his eyes already glazing over from the morphine.

  "Well, at least somebody's having a good time," Heath said.

  ****

  Captain Rukanah Ahhamid held a towel to his head and applied pressure to the bloody rip in his scalp. He stood watching his men pick at the slope of broken block and dirt where one wall of the tunnel partially collapsed. The pile of scree was blocking one half of the passageway and preventing their further progress. It was another delay. It was another unwelcome excuse for being late. His brother would be furious. Well, he would be more furious.

  He ordered the trucks and vans to cut their engines. They were filling the tunnel with carbon monoxide. All would be dead before they finished their work. The vapors added to the piercing pain in his skull. The men dug by the glare of the headlights of a pick-up truck Rukanah had taken as his command car. The battered Land Rover had been shoved to one side of the tunnel; a bullet hole drilled through its radiator. It was crushed to the wall when the armored Saladin trundled past.

  The chink and clink of the shovels was making the pounding pain in his head worse. He had cracked his skull on something when the Rover had been t-boned. His men pulled him from the wreck unconscious. The driver and escort were both dead. The driver had been shot in the head and Rukanah's uniform front was crusted with dried blood and sticky gobbets of brain matter.

  The men removed their shirts and were dripping with sweat as they shoveled away dirt and lifted blocks and moved them to piles along the wall in an effort to clear a path. Their shadows were thrown far down the tunnel in the light of the headlamps. They were slowly creating an opening in the wall. Someone set charges at the entrance to a service tunnel that ran under the compound. In a mistaken effort to close it off to the rescuers? Or perhaps the rebels were inside the service tunnel right now and blew it down to cut off pursuit.

  There was enough of an opening cleared for a man to crawl through. Rukanah pointed at three men and they picked up rifles and belly-crawled through the hole into the dark tunnel.

  Behind Rukanah the glare of the lights blinked and waned then blinked and died, throwing the tunnel into utter blackness. Another inexcusable delay.

  By flashlight, the men quickly replaced the battery in the truck and continued on with the shoveling and clearing.

  Rukanah leaned back on the truck's hood between the headlights and closed his eyes. Oh, Tazi would be livid. His rage would be unquenchable. But with all of the troubles and labors and his aching skull, Rukanah's temper was getting shorter as well. His rage was growing to match the levels of heat he imagined Tazi was reaching. By the time they met again, if Tazi dared shout in his face, Rukanah was very likely to put a bullet in his big brother's brain.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  THE BOTTOM RUNG

  Heath lay flat on the floor and took a turkey peek around the corner of the doorway.

  Inside, some black men dressed in a mix of running clothes, military camo and underwear sat playing a spirited game of cards and smoking cigarettes.

  Heath pulled the ignition cord from the handle of a mod 77 Chi-com stick grenade and winged it in through the opening at an angle. As he rolled away he heard it clatter, clatter, clatter within. Shouted questions turned to high squeals in the rising panic of the card players.

  Love the stick grenade, he thought. You can really curve that sucker.

  He covered his ears, opened his mouth and rode the localized temblor that rocked the floor beneath him. Before he could get to his feet, Manny and Chili charged past and sprayed automatic fire into the dense smoke pouring from the room.

  They rushed through the smoke with Flame bringing up drag. Men and parts of men lay sprawled across the wreckage of the room. The blast of the grenade was multiplied by the confined space of the room and turned half the men to bloody rag bundles. The others were incapacitated by the concussive shock and finished off with short bursts from the rifles of the SEALs.

  Their repeated virtual visits to this level informed them that the only way out was through this squad room where most of the personnel were gathered. On their way to the card room, they came upon other men asleep in bunks inside dormitory style rooms. They did them silently with daggers. The largest concentration of men, in the card room, they left for last. These were all black Africans. They wore mismatched uniforms with the insignia torn off. They were mercenaries drawn here from the war zones of the south by the big talk from Gaddafi. Now they were forced to fight beside the loyalists in a battle to the death. The color of their skin branded them as targets to the rebels. Their only sure chance for escape was to fight their way out. Many of these mercs were high school age; kids who humped an AK before they had hair on their balls.

  None of that gained them an ounce of sympathy from any of the men in the brick. The team had been to Somalia and the Sudan and seen what little pricks like this were capable of. They'd seen entire villages where everyone, even the smallest child, lost a foot or an arm to the machetes of mercenaries. Men and boys just like the ones lying in stinking bits all over the floor. Let God sort them out.

  Heath spotted a row of terminal boxes set in a wall of the room. He flipped them open to find ranks of circuit breakers inside.

  "Yo," he said.

  Manny turned to him to see Heath jerk a thumb at the terminals.

  "We're going dark," Manny said and pulled down his night vision gear. The others followed suit though Flame needed some help from Chili to get his situated on his head properly.

  Heath flipped the main breaker switches to ‘off' and the room went pitch black. He pumped rounds into the boxes to shut the lights out for good. When it went dark, it went quieter. A generator hum they barely registered before went dead. The buzz of the overhead fluorescents died.

  A new sound reached them. Boots on metal steps.

  Manny took point and rushed up the set of steel stairs at the far end of the room. The stairs led to a landing and the next flight turned back up to the next level. He heard boots clanging down from the flight above and stopped to wait for them to show. Chili moved to just behind his right elbow. Two armed black men reached the landing at a trot only to come to a halt, eyes wide, and staring into the impenetrable dark. The two SEALs waiting just a few steps below were invisible to them.

  The AK rounds struck the men pointblank and Manny and Chili went past them as their lifeless bodies fell to the grating. The pair of SEALs opened up on a full squad of startled mercs stumbling down the stairs with flashlights in hand. The men had no time to react to the big men who seemed to materialize from a cloud of gun smoke, noise and dark. Chili pumped round after round through the confused tangle of men. Manny drove the butt of his AK into the forehead of one man and swiped it across the jaw of another on the backstroke. He finished each with double-taps and both SEALs charged up the blood slick steps to take the next landing and kick in a steel door marked with a large numeral four.

  The stairwell topped out at the Level Four entry. They would have preferred that the well ran all the way to the surface but bunkers don't abide by established building codes. The ancient principles of concentric defenses applied here. By its very nature the bunker had to be a rat's maze to hamper attackers. That meant the SEALs would have to either fight or stealth their way across each floor to find the next way up. Shutting out the lights turned out to be the way to go. The advantage of sight was theirs.

  Heath followed behind them, urging Flame before him. Flame was doing better now, the pain in his back melted away. His movements weren't as athletic and fluid as they normally would be. The flat images coming to him through the night lenses didn't help his coordination. Flame was one hyper dude most days and it was just plain wrong to see his gait so loose and his reactions delayed. The man's brain would be turning to cotton candy too soon. Heath would stay close to him. In the positive column, Flame was ambulatory. As long as he kept marching upwards, they had a chance. If they had to carry him, they'd lose precious time and mobility.

  The Level Four hallway was empty despite all the chaos that had erupted below. With months of firefights, mortar barrages, artillery duels and cluster bombing, a little gunfight in the basement wasn't going to draw that much attention. It was just more background noise muffled by the six-foot thick floors. Manny and Chili moved down the corridor with guns up. A man, an Arab this time, appeared at the end of the hall with a spotlight in his fist. He wasn't moving with any degree of wariness, probably thought it was just a power outage. He lost a bet and was chosen to go downstairs and flip the switches. The man wasn't even armed. They watched him drawing closer and saw him register surprise as his spotlight beam revealed them.

  Chili brought him down with the silenced automatic. Double-tap. Head shot. Center shot. They stepped over him and moved on. Heath and Flame followed behind. Flame picked up the spotlight, fumbled for the off switch and finally bashed it against the wall to drop the corridor into darkness again.

  Four levels to daylight. It wasn't going to be easy. But it wasn't going to be impossible either.

  A fighting chance.

  And that's all they could ask for.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  THE CONVOY

  We're coming, big brother, thought Rukanah Ahhamid through a haze of pain pounding inside his skull.